July 7.
     A travel tip for those of you who might want to visit Hampton Court Palace while you're in England:  Don't go during the week when the place is hosting the annual Flower Show.  You know how the English are about their gardens.  Hosting the annual Flower Show is like hosting Disney World for a week. A trip from Oxford that should have taken us 90 minutes took us over two hours.  I was so flustered that I never even got a group photo.  But we got to see everything and enjoyed the beautiful weather, and, honestly, nearly everybody was there for the flowers, so the palace and palace gardens were perfectly navigable once we got to the gate.  Today's visit was my third, spread over 40 years, and I think the current system of managing visitors is the most effective and most efficient one yet.
     Here's my trusty assistant, John C., deciding which tour option to take first:

     And here's a group waiting for lunch at the Tiltyard Cafe.  After lunch they all went through the maze, but I did not get a photo.

    In a few minutes we will reconvene in our classroom to write in journals and talk about the day.  Tomorrow we are back in the classroom for Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and newspapers.  What a good time to be reading the British press....